


At the Ass-Crack of Dawn, an Alien Appeared

by CalamityCons



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Aliens, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cronus Ampora (mentioned) - Freeform, Gen, Hsetau - Freeform, Vriska Serket (mentioned) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 08:38:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10940895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityCons/pseuds/CalamityCons
Summary: Your name is Eridan Ampora, and there is a chlorine-soaked alien in the backseat of your car. It fell into your family pool while you were leaning against its edge and considering drowning yourself so your dad would pay attention to you a little and actually go looking for mom like he promised. You didn’t wind up going through with it, both because the human-shaped monster got you soaking wet before you even went into it, and because Damara wouldn’t stop bugging you about picking up your goddamn Nerf rifle off the kitchen floor.





	At the Ass-Crack of Dawn, an Alien Appeared

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in my Homestuck Extra-Terrestrial AU! You can find more information @hsetau on tumblr.

Your name is Eridan Ampora, and there is a monster in the backseat of your car. Well. Technically it isn’t your car, yet. It belongs to your dad’s Ford-partnered car dealership, and it’s under your name through inheritance and other bullshit that you don’t understand. You’re loaning it out to your night maid Damara so she can drive you to school in the mornings, since your dad’s in his after-party coma every day and you live in a very high end area but go to a low-end school to save money. The bus for your school just doesn’t get to your mountain-top country club neighborhood, ever, so you get Damara to do it every weekday morning, from 6:10 am when you have to leave in order to arrive on time, to 8:00 am.  


In return, you let her use it to commute around town in general. Most of the time you go from your house in the wealthy mountain neighborhoods to her flat downtown, where she runs a weekend thrift store on the ground floor and has two stories of home space to sleep and eat in. She takes a nap for about 30 minutes and you’re stuck hanging out with her daughter Aradia for half an hour every morning.  


Usually, you and Aradia sit together in the backseat and gripe at each other or work on your group project together. But you can’t do that this time, since there’s a chlorine-soaked alien taking up that space right now. It fell into your family pool while you were leaning against its edge and considering drowning yourself so your dad would pay attention to you a little and actually go looking for mom like he promised. You didn’t wind up going through with it, both because the human-shaped monster got you soaking wet before you even went into it, and because Damara wouldn’t stop bugging you about picking up your goddamn Nerf rifle off the kitchen floor.  


It’s still uncomfortable, since your clothes are fresh but your favorite cobalt blue scarf is damp after getting soaked. While you were thinking on what to do with the monster that showed up in your home (covered in some kind of jet black shell, not breathing or moving at all, probably dead) Damara had gone back inside the house and hauled you some clothes to wear. You refused to take off your scarf, though. It’s too important.  


You’re sick of it being wet, so you press the button on the side of the door to open the car window. The Rocky Mountains have a certain quality to its air, clear and still with the scent of maple trees on the wind. Since the car is moving and there’s no street lights to get in the way, you unravel your scarf from your neck and hold it out in your right arm, letting it flap in the early morning wind and dry that way. The sun is barely waking up at this point, staining the night sky with purples and oranges. You feel sunlight slip between the trees and pass by your face as if from the other side of prison bars, lighting up the road in long red stripes. Nobody else is driving through the mountain pass this early in the day, especially not this shitty pothole riddled one that bounces you in your seat every so often. You aren’t wearing a seat belt for that reason.  


“あなたは傷つくでしょう。 やめる。”  


“If you think I can understand you when you talk that fast you’re dead fuckin’ wrong.” You look over to Damara with your right arm still stretched out the window. You see her tapping on the steering wheel and her deep, rust-red eyes glance at you without moving her head. She’s using both hands to steer the car and it feels off to you. She never does that. You can tell she’s scared of the monster in the car too. It showed up out of the blackness of the sky, and you think you heard her mutter something in Japanese about nightmares she had as a kid.  


You drive in silence again. Well, you aren’t driving, but Damara is and you’re in the passenger seat. You’re not used to being in the passenger seat. Even when Damara wasn’t driving you around you had chauffeurs to do that anyway, because Cronus Ampora would be damned if he ever lifted a finger that couldn’t be lifted by someone he paid.  


Your dad says that he’s being generous, creating jobs for all those lowly sobs who wouldn’t have anything to do if he didn’t hire them to drive you to school or clean his bathroom for him or set up the decorations for his next boring adult party where he can get drunk (again), try and fail to host an orgy (again), and over-eat (again) until he doesn’t wake up till 3 pm (again).  


Dad would sooner hire the police to arrest your mom for stealing one of his fancier Ford Hybrids than hire an investigator to search for her as a Missing Person. You look back at your arm, numbly getting pelted by the wind, and you figure the scarf is dry enough now to wrap it back around your neck.  


It smells like chlorine now. You’ll have to wash it by hand later, with the gentle stuff, so the yarn doesn’t unravel. Your mom spent a lot of time and effort learning to knit with just her one, left arm, and you remember the sheer concentration in her cobalt eyes. You don’t really know how she lost the right arm to begin with. She changed the story every time you asked.  


“My ex-girlfriend put a bomb inside one of my magic eight balls,” she said when you were 3. “The giant spider who lived in my house bit it off when I didn’t feed her in time,” she said when you were 4. “I tried to jury-rig a slot machine and the gears tore it up,” she said when you were 8. “I got into a motorcycle accident,” she said when you were 10. That was the last story she told you before she abandoned you three years ago.  


You glance at the side mirror out of the frame of your glasses and stare into your violet eyes for a while. You start wondering if you can see the monster laid flat on the backseat from this angle. Then you feel the car come to a stop at an intersection, just before the seldom-crossed road to the Reservoir where you had planned to dump the monster. Far away from civilization where nobody could find it and no cameras could see it. It was the perfect crime.  


You wait for a full five seconds before you turn to look at Damara. She’s staring off into space, holding a breath in and hiking her shoulders up to her ears. The car is still stopped.  


“You suddenly forget how to driv-ve or something?” You hear yourself stutter on the v sound and mentally kick yourself.  


“My shift is over.” Damara says.  


“Like hell it’s over.” You stutter again. Fuck. You look at the clock on the digital dashboard of the car (Ford C Max Hybrid, your dad says proudly in the back of your head). It’s 6:12 am, 12 minutes after the agreed end time of Damara’s night shift that starts every day at 8:50 pm. And 2 minutes after she’s supposed to take you to school. You don’t get it, she should still be on work hours, what is she getting at?  


“Do you remember your backpack?” Of course I did, you say with furrowed brows and a glare from under the top frame of your glasses. Damara isn’t fazed. “Then we will return to my house. I will bring you and Aradia to school.”  


“Hell no! Did you suddenly forget w-we have a monster in the backseat of the car?” Your stutters gotten worse now that you’ve noticed it, and now you can feel blood flushing to your head. “I’m loaning you this expe-pensiv—,” damn it, “this fancy ass car so you can take me w-where I need to go, and right now-wuh-wuh,” shit god pissing damn it, “at this time I need you to go to the reserv—…”  


You’re stuck on that ending, holding the v sound in your mouth even though you really don’t want to right now, this is not going to convince her to do as she’s told, she’s such a petulant fucking bitch sometimes—  


“It is probably just cosplayer. That is not dangerous.” Damara darts her eyes to the monster for a split second, immediately tensing. Like a criminal, you think. You always figured she was with the yakuza. Your brain informs you that Aradia told you about that bullshit story you don’t believe about how “bad guys” forced your mom to abandon her husband, but you also know that you’re trying to get rid of a monster right now.  


“It’s dead!” You finally say. “It didn’t breathe w-when w-we poked at it!” You try to find a way to say the next part of your sentence without tripping on your words again. “It’s gotta go, into the lake, w-where it doesn’t… w-where it can die!”  


Damara gives you a look, wrinkling her nose and darting her eyes toward the backseat. She’s poking her chin out at you and you don’t know what her head gesture is supposed to mean. You shuffle in your seat to stare her down better and prepare to give her a lesson in respecting the people who are generous enough to give her a job despite having the world’s shittiest English—  


_“Ba’ berslila eyik.”  
_

You twist immediately to face the backseat at the third voice in your argument. The monster woke up. It woke up and it’s looking at you and oh god it doesn’t even have pupils in its eyes. No irises either, just straight white all over with some faint segmentation that reminds you of the eyes of beetles and your stomach drops to your toes.  


You reach over to the steering wheel, pulling your knee up and getting the black leather dirty with the bottom of your Lanvins so you get the leverage you need to leap into the driver’s seat and floor it. But Damara’s stronger than she looks, and she’s shouting at you in angry Japanese you can’t possibly pick up on while hauling you back onto the passenger’s seat. Your leg kicks out from under you and you’re in an uncomfortable spot on the floorboard between the dashboard and your seat, so you wriggle out of it yourself and wind up kicking open the storage compartment, getting yourself covered in paperwork, identifying documents, and the contents of an old first aid kit that cracked open from its shitty hinges.  


You complain and grunt the whole time as you feel Damara swiftly steer the car somewhere else and hear the engine turn off. You can tell Damara is trying to talk to the monster in her language, but the monster’s response is smooth and dark and sounds nothing like Japanese, and you should know, Aradia and Damara talk in it all the time to hide shit from you. You manage to wriggle into your seat and twist back around to glare at Damara for doing that.  


You turn to face the monster and you suddenly realize the light from the sun has turned a warm red-orange, and the alien seems to lose its train of thought when it stares at you.  


_“Preslila ōre kethbu eyikos kierapishos hivish.”  
_

As it says this, you watch it straighten its back and close its eyes. It has a strange, regal way about it, even though its clothes are torn up and bloodied, and it seems to flinch whenever it moves its left arm. Belatedly, as the red sunlight slowly shifts to white, you see blood dribbling down its right arm.  


Damara tries again to talk to it in Japanese. The alien responds with that same dark voice (deeper than you would have expected, it has an hourglass figure you thought only grown up women could have) in that same strange language.  


“I don’t think it speaks Japanese, Dam,” you hear yourself say. You feel Damara turn her head to you for a moment, then return her gaze to the monster. She doesn’t like it when you call her Dam.  


“Pass me the bandages.” She says. You look at the bleeding arm of the humanoid monster that fell from the sky. You start to wonder, if it fell from the sky does that make it an alien and not a monster? You wonder about the implications of meeting an actual sapient alien species (and get the jingle of Actual Cannibal Shia LaBouf stuck in your head again) as you pass a box of gauze to the alien with your right arm.  
It hesitates at first, then reaches for it with its left arm. You feel its fingers brush against yours. They’re hard, like a chess piece made of ivory, but a bit cooler than your own hand. You press into your seat’s back a little by accident when Damara starts the car again and makes a U-turn. You look at her, kneeling on the seat and leaning toward the alien, but Damara only glances back at you. She has only her left arm on the steering wheel now.  


“Put on your seatbelt,” she says. “I’ll have to take the highway if you want to get to school on time.”  


“Your not the boss of me,” you say automatically.  


“When you’re in my car, you follow my rules.”  


“Hmph.” You roll your eyes, receiving the box of gauze from the alien once it’s finished wrapping itself up. “Don’t get used to it. It’ll be mine once I turn sixteen.” You cross your left arm over your right and plop down on the seat to make a point.  


“Well you aren’t. Put on your seatbelt.”  


You mutter to yourself and put the medicine (and the paperwork) back into the dashboard storage compartment. When Damara shoots you something that might be a smile or might be a sneer, you groan and put the damn seatbelt on.   


In the backseat, you hear the alien do the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Droog's dialogue:
> 
> _Ba’ berslila eyik_ \- "Are you kidnapping me?" he's confused and looking for answers.
> 
> _Preslila ōre kethbu eyikos kierapishos hivish_ \- "I weep, because you own not bodies of beauty." which is a very polite way of saying 'god youre fucking ugly'


End file.
